Incompatible Ballerina and Other Essays

cwjohns@hotmail.co.uk

Foreword One

Neurotic Ontology

I have drunk quite a lot of tea with Charlie Johns. In almost equal degree I have comprehended and failed to comprehend what he attempts to convey – though in both cases I have been left exhilarated by the conversations. The intensity of these encounters is here inscribed in this text – both in this response to it and his essays. Indeed the way in which this foreword feeds off the text is reminiscent of the neurotic/assimilative process. That is, as I have assimilated in part through my own neurotic nature the material herein, it infects my own neuroses, attaches too, feeds them and feeds off them; it breeds with them and spawns new ideas which in turn mutate and take flight (Deleuze rejected dialectics but possibly he missed the desiring status of the neurotic vector itself, the violent sexualised proliferation of the concept).

But what is this neurotic/assimilative action of which he speaks? Assimilation is probably the more comprehensible of the two concepts. Beings assimilate each other on multiple horizons: comestible, physical (forceful interactions), informational, through perception and spoken/written language (it will be understood here that beings may be material or immaterial). However, it is then the first of these two terms that we must really attempt to address, for without forging some idea of what neurosis is, the work will become nigh on impossible to comprehend or indeed assimilate. So, we can establish beings assimilate beings, but it is neurosis that determines what the beings will assimilate.

Neurosis [for Johns], is a concept that must no longer be considered a psychological/pathological condition; rather the work attempts to create a lens through which the Neurotic is seen as the most appropriate way to conceive of Being. That is, neurosis is taken to be an ontological category. This does not discount the psychological phenomenon, indeed in my interpretation, the psychological phenomenon of neurosis is the clue to the ontological. I see it as something akin to a transcendental argument in which the everyday (ontic) manifestation of neurosis has as the condition of its possibility a wider neurotic force.

In this way neurosis spills speculatively out of its psychological home into its quasi-transcendental status. Its hypostasis reveals it as a force greater than the individual psyche; ironically of course its hypostasis is uncovered by its own action [neurosis is neurotically disclosed]. This force is essentially unhuman, yet it is ironically brought to its highest manifestation in the paradox of the human subject. We might say that the individual history of the subject, in all its joy and trauma, has the possibility to transcend itself by tapping into the power of neurosis. At one stage in this process it will seem as if the process is being done by the subject itself, but in the final overcoming it is the neurosis itself that speaks, not Man: think of Being in Heidegger or Will-to-Power in Nietzsche, even logic in Russell.

In making this claim, we can immediately see the breadth that neurosis must cover: language, desire, philosophy, science; it becomes impossible to escape it, for either in conscious or materialist mode, the relentless movement of the different planes of being can be perceived in this way: guiding the assimilation. So is neurosis supposed to be an illuminating apophansis, or does it aim to be the supreme category of Being? I think we must go with the former (and this is not to deprecate the concept), for all putative concepts set themselves against other illuminating disclosures, and the criteria by which we might differentiate between them are impossible to discern (though historical movements disclose some as more important than others). That being said it will be instructive to dwell on this matter with regard to another philosopher of restless motion, i.e. Hegel

Is there any sense of identity between neurosis/assimilation and the dialectic, if purely as a heuristic aid to comprehension? Well before language falls through our fingers, let us say these concepts are not equivalent but that there is a certain family resemblance. The dialectic is not insane enough, or at least the normal interpretation of the dialectic does not usually convey the obsessive nature that is clearly implied by neurosis. The most cogent sense I find between the two is that in which the Hegelian concept exposes itself to its own incoherencies. The sad result of this attempt at greater coherence is of course the unceasing gnawing of a given notion upon itself – its own destruction (‘a bit like a little creature that gets put into a box full of other creatures and eventually is eaten to death.’). The concept’s autosarcophagy, its autoassimilation, is ultimately the birth of the subject – the suffering idea brings forth the subject (this is at least how I come to comprehend parts of the Lost and the Lonely).

Possibly a more accurate description of the state of affairs – from the text’s perspective – would be to say that dialectical understanding is the product of neurosis: it is the form neurosis took in the overcoming of Hegel (as neurotic vehicle). Simultaneously we must grant that the coming into being of neurosis is also conceivable as the product of certain dialectical processes. Indeed we can conceive of it as the conversion of the earlier mentioned transcendental move (neurosis as the condition of possibility) into the inadequacy of the neurosis ( as psychological condition) to withstand its own conceptual boundaries, thus transmuting itself into neurosis.

As it happens I do have a concern in this area, for in moving from the psychological condition to the ontological I feel we are drawn into taking another concept with us: the concept of psychosis. The neurotic, by definition, has an awareness of his/her obsession, the psychotic does not. To this end, whilst I see the apophantic value of neurosis, I end up seeing it largely as forming consciousness and self-consciousness and seeing the possibility of an ontological psychosis driving putatively unconscious and material forces – this is an unfinished debate I have had with Charlie.

The reader may well notice a certain titan whose presence pervades this text. Prometheus of course has his trace in this afore-mentioned conceptual self-devouring, though the trace is not of this precise ilk, but rather the related structure of being-eaten-alive (which is necessarily true of the autosarcophage). Prometheus owns this text – it is almost a subtitle (What Prometheus Did Next…) and a foreword necessarily also belongs with this myth. For promethean can mean fore-thinking. Thought and word are neurotically related. The phenomenology which attaches them is impossible to extirpate from out of the psyche even when representation as a dominant force can be shown to be false.

Furthermore at least some fore-thinking is fore-wording: the thinking which brings forth the spoken or written concept. This has the echo of at least three other senses i) all fore-thinking is a fore-warning (and there is a warning in this text – a self-help manual lurks within her[e]) ii) all fore-wording is fore-being where word emanates – homologically, not linguistically, from sein (werden), and lastly of course (for Heidegger) fore-thinking is fore-thanking.

So in our temporal openness to Being, our thinking brings this openness into visibility and yet simultaneously we are grateful for this granting. Here again the non-human part becomes visible, for in saying that we thought the thoughts which disclosed the beings for which we express our gratitude, we become aware that this disclosure is part of something bigger than any individual psyche. This non-human power is here described as neurosis.

This Heideggerian angle also generates considerations that the neurotic power may be of use in grounding anxiety – as used in Being and Time. Neurosis generates contingent obsession. Psychological (ontic) neurosis, as mentioned, turns on awareness of the condition. This issue of awareness is interesting from two interwoven issues.

Firstly if we take (from Being and Time) Heidegger’s notion of Dasein being the being for which its own Being is an issue, then awareness of the existential situation is described as essentially constitutive of it (i.e. that the being obsesses about the facticity of its own existence is intrinsically its nature). As such the usage of the term neurotic here seems highly appropriate.

Secondly we have grounds here for a reconsideration of the contingency of anxiety as the mood which discloses authentic Dasein’s being-towards-death. The standard criticism being that this particular mood does not deserve the privileged position it is given for Dasein’s authentic disclosure, rather it is contingent upon the epoch in which we dwell. However, now we can invoke anxiety on the basis of the factical obsession. That is, I am suggesting that we might derive the necessity of anxiety by neurosis as a [psycho-]ontological source of anxiety.

The two points are thus related: the viewing of Dasein as a being obsessed (neurotic) with its own existence is precisely what generates the anxiety of which Heidegger speaks and thus renders both as ontologically legitimate, insofar as we accept the questioning as constitutive and identify neurosis with this essential questioning.

This version does not deny the inhuman power of neurosis – it can be said to belong to Being –, but neither does it support its more metaphysical side (as the desiring aspect of material being). This idea of the will of materiality would, for me, come under the aforementioned transcendental psychotic.

Lastly, I just had some Wittgensteinian musings. These were inspired by the mentioning of Christ within the text. I am not a Christian, though I can scarcely deny the power of that particular egregore. Christ died, either symbolically or actually, we can agree on one of these with no dent to any given atheism or belief in an alternative deity. This choice brings into sharp relief an aspect of meaning easily obscured by some ways of seeing Wittgenstein’s meaning as use. As a card carrying pseudo-Wittgensteinian I adhere to this mantra. But highlighted here is how this kind of meaning is only the meaning of things on various horizons, or possibly the horizons of use have not been thought enough.

We might ask ‘what is death?’ And maybe we answer that the word (and its verbal forms) death is purely its use in certain situations: ‘did you know that Wilson is dead?’ Here we must be careful not to hypostatize. Death is still not a thing (unless it is a pneuminous thing). It’s a language game played in a variety of situations. ‘Did he die?’ ‘No actually he was ok.’ It’s a way of talking about certain events and possibilities of events. What happens afterwards is anybody’s phantasy.

But Christ’s death? If it has any meaning it is not in simply saying that he died, it’s that there is a teleology at work here transcendent to death. It doesn’t matter whether or not you are a Christian to see this point; we can expand it in other directions which may or may not prove fruitful in explaining what on earth Mr Johns is talking about.

If we substitute ‘died’ for ‘ate’ and ‘Christ’ for ‘Johnson’ and ‘for our sins’ for ‘because he was hungry’ then we say that ‘Johnson ate because he was hungry’ is the same as ‘Christ died for our sins’. That these two sentences are clearly not equivalent is hardly the point. That is, in the instantiation the excess of the latter comes to light. If we say that ‘ate’ is defined only in terms of usage (in a limited sense), we understand why Deleuze accuses Wittgenstein of pulling dead fish out of a pool; ‘ate’ then becomes an activity which not only escapes a certain analytic definition but moves beyond meaning as use as it is often conceived.

The teleology of the verb is always immanent to it (think of incorporeal transformation in Thousand Plateaus, or of the Goethean perception of a phenomenon). Johnson ate because he was hungry (it implies an in-order-to), there is a putative interaction of physical bodies and a transformation brought about by the verb, the difference between the composite parts of a scene and the seeing of them as interacting with each other, the seeing of that verb. Language can try to capture an event: one plane of happening.

But this extension of the notion is insufficient for Christ’s death. The meaning of Christ’s death is teleological in its crude opening of the possibility that there is meaning at all on the metaphysical level. We would still however need faith to open the door to this possibility and then we still have a different situation of meaning because Christ’s death, whether or not he was the son of God, presents us with the minimum binary choice of he was/wasn’t precisely because he has been presented as such. This in turn begs the question of what it would mean that God existed and that he had a son (what is a son? a real son? an adopted son? – meaning as use seems to creep in again). There is a proliferation of meaning that occurs in Christ’s death beyond that of Johnson eating his baked potato. This proliferation is again something akin to the higher order neurosis mentioned herein (a Christian neurosis, a madness of faith and speculation exemplified by debates on the ‘truth’ of the nature of the resurrection etc.)

When we accept meaning as use, I believe we follow an essentially correct insight. What we must be careful to remember is that there are many horizons of use and that the criteria for the applicability of certain language games are not always readily visible. Christ’s death as a language game goes beyond the language game of death and yet relates to it. The excess within use is within the use, yet ironically what use is excess? It creates a seeking for meaning that is endless: the proliferation of an infinite series. Even if meaning could in one respect be totalizable, other phenomenological horizons of it would render it open to questioning. Such a seeking can of course be characterised aptly as Neurotic…

Graham Freestone

Co-founder of The Lincoln Philosophy Forum, U.K.

Foreword Two

Ballet as a Sleeping Beauty

Ballet by nature is both beautiful and tragic; both whimsical and stern; embodying both elements of feather lightness and steel strength. Throughout its long and illustrious history, Ballet has brought forth the ideal of perfection in stance, posture, shapes, steps, curves, symmetry, and breath. So much so, in fact, that it has sparked artistic revolutions, influenced opulent courts, and inspired divine kings to learn its positions and twirls. Even today ballet continues to be a two faced coin, flipping between representations of both classical and modern movement philosophies. There is a dichotomy that has always been a thin curtain within the ballet world, with dancers and artists constantly having to pass from one side to the other; a side of tradition, grandeur, repose, and elegance and the other side of contemporaries, experimenters, with boundless and evolving creative scope. Ironically, ballet has continued to be one of the few art forms that has survived its own chimera challenges. It never quite lets go of its past and it never quite leaps with both feet into the future. And yet, that is part of the appeal of ballet; it is both everlasting and ephemeral. And with this pliability has come constancy. Ballet has been successful in withstanding war, poverty and plague, maintaining its movement vocabulary and its metaphorical artistically structural backbone while still strategically dancing around political regimes, economic strife, and destabilizing global pandemics. Ballet has cultivated the theory surrounding a human ideal, defining and symbolizing what perfection in motion can look like, and should, according to patrons and non-patrons of the art form.

Johns brings forth many cerebral points about ballet, its history and its continued revolutionary ideas in this book. As you probe through this intellectual text, I encourage you to grab onto the author’s suggestions and hints as he uses ballet, and the ballerina specifically, to bring to light not the process of a revolution or even how beauty can influence a revolution, but that moment when a revolution happens and then fades to become a commercialized commodity for the masses to consume, evaluate, question and accept as something that can represent beauty. It is difficult to only view ballet in one spotlight because there are so many angles to examine the art form from. However, if we were to pick two bulbs to examine the ballet dancer from, let us choose beauty and tragedy for this brief discussion. What is it that makes ballet beautiful? And not only beautiful, but aesthetically appealing on a global scale?

For example, bringing certain opera forms to a country where musicality is defined by a certain tone of notes and the elements which make up the ideal sounds, then the opera may seem annoying and disjointed for the outside listener. But bring a ballet (with sets, costumes, and music) to any foreign audience and it will be rare to find a spectator who does not find at least one thing about the production beautiful. Why is this true? Possibly in the idea of watching a human form we can all aspire to its universal appeal. We are all human and so no matter our background we can all relate to and strive for the aesthetic perfection we see in the poised limbs and sculpted muscles of another human body in movement. And Johns’ text pulls even more concepts to the forefront, suggesting that the ballerina makes a conscience decision to be seen as beautiful, even though she is mostly the creative outlet of the choreographer. Does she see herself as beautiful? Does she feel obligated to perpetuate this beautiful ideal? Why? Johns even goes so far as to ask us, in no uncertain terms, who is it that believes she is beautiful and why? The author writes Philosophically she is a nihilist, and not a good one at that, because she doesn’t believe in what she is trying to represent, and makes herself art as a consequence (hence destroying the aura between art and subject, further making art/meaning ubiquitous). Johns challenges the reader throughout this text, especially with this statement, to really look at the ballerina as an entity of her own, not just an object or a representation. I find this vain of theory compelling because it sparks so many other paths of thought.

Why is it that within ballet beauty and strength may coexist so harmoniously? A man can be both beautiful and strong within the realm of ballet; a woman can be both waspish and fearless within the realm of ballet. Beauty is not defined by gender in ballet. Both Maria Tallcheif and Rudolf Nureyev have been described as beautiful dancers. So what allows ballet to have traditional male/female roles within its story lines, but embrace such androgens definitions of beauty? Possibly because the structure of ballet as an art form is beautiful all on its own, with the dancers being just the vessel which emanates that beauty. Yet, how can something that is itself beautiful also be tragic? I have heard of someone describing something as tragically beautiful, but what does that actually mean? Is it tragically beautiful because it has no equal, nothing it can compare to in the sense of alliance or compatibility? Is it tragically beautiful because it is alone on a pedestal as a single emblem of beauty? Is ballet tragically beautiful because of the facade it cultivates; something that is outwardly beautiful, but inwardly becomes sacrificial to obtain that beauty, thus creating tragedy. Can something be beautifully tragic rather than tragically beautiful? Would that be a better description of ballet; when humiliation, misfortune and disaster are suddenly depicted through movements that are graceful, angelic and alluring.

How has ballet remained beautiful over time? While certain aspects of ballet have evolved, the essence of the art form has remained relatively resolute unlike other humanities such as music, architecture, visual art, sculpture, theatre, etc. Even as the greater humanities embrace the digital age, incorporating technology into elements of performance and the creative process, ballet has kept hi-tech components at arms-length causing very little backlash or lethargy concerning the continuance of the art form. Why? Possibly because, plainly speaking, ballet does not require any embellishments or adornments; ballet itself is beauty, and beauty always survives.

Kirsten Wilkinson

Trained ballet dancer and dance archivist

Preface

A Philosophy of Neurosis/Four Fireworks

The essays in this book all hide behind the less demanding/disciplined activity/genre of creative writing as opposed to philosophical literature¹. This is because the ‘selfless-ness’² required to elaborate on difficult philosophical themes (such as what the fundamental constituents of ‘reality’ are, and how we can manage to adequately inquire and speak of this ‘knowledge’ of reality) is something that I do not possess (however, my³ desire sometimes comes into contact with such systems of thought in these four essays).

The selfishness of creative writing and poetry ("its command is to revere ones own soul"⁴) is in a sense ‘Evil’⁵ in that it stems from necessarily fascist judgements and values (aesthetics)⁶. It is evil also because it refuses to directly correspond to truths, objects, referents (preferring metaphor) in favour of poetical liberation rather than rational, positivist and utilitarian progression. Literature, finally, is evil because it stems from the power to name, such and such as object, as good, as right. The determination of who takes these orders of ‘naming’, and who is included/excluded in their inauguration and dissemination, is yet to be fully realised.

In order for philosophy to equal that of life we must polemically be ‘anti-philosophical’; we must be neurotic and obsessive, not disciplined and ‘intellectual’. The philosophical meditation hides within it already the neurotic impulse; to speak to oneself, to create a dialogue within ones head to answer ostensibly ‘objective’, collective, universal and worldly questions. To write (the history of philosophy archaically adheres to this medium) is already to write to oneself under the guise of an external ‘audience’. What results in the history of philosophy is a repressed neurosis subordinated to projects, means and ends, which nullify neurosis under the less hysterical neurosis of uniformed values ‘in-the-world’, of social neurosis which underpins the ideology of uniform, purposive, valuable consciousness⁷.

The insatiable desire I possess in the activity of writing seems to evaporate when confronted with propositions outside the carnal and semantic world (logic, some impersonal ‘objective’ science etc…), but these concepts too have the pathos of desire within them, and because they are human concepts they too are shaped by the characteristic of neurosis. Presently (and consistent with my theories) my neurosis cannot take hold of such ‘a-subjective’ data for itself, as such things as ‘logic’ defy the terms (my) neurosis demands (objectification, identification with myself, imaging, a return to the irrational)⁸. My thoughts are still determined by fundamental cultural-social neuroses; sexuality, gender, social regulations and values, a western heritage of knowledge/power, the arena of ‘the imaginary’. However, at points beyond my will, ‘my’ neurosis latches